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With a history of over one
century, the qualitative research holds, nowadays, in the world, in the sphere
of social sciences, an unanimously acknowledged place, representing not only a
specific scientific approach, used ever more courageously in studying the
people’s social life, but also a subject for debate and dispute, found more and
more often on the spotlight of the international scientific community.

The qualitative data catch
the interpretations that the social players assign to their own feelings,
attitudes and values, as well as to the events they witnessed or not, but which
influenced their lives in some way. Regardless of the dominant paradigm, the qualitative
research will allow the use of qualitative data in their
“tri-dimensional” form, text-image-sound. Thus, the qualitativist
researcher in social sciences will be able to lean, in the process of
constructing the social world, on a multitude of data types: from the texts of
certain social, personal or public documents, to the field notes and to the
interview scripts, from the static images given by photographs, drawings,
sketches, maps, to the dynamic images, accompanied by sound, given by the video
recordings, from the audio materials collected during the fieldwork, to the
ones produced for cultural-artistic purposes. The potential of all these
qualitative data is not however exhausted once the researches they were
produced in are completed. The full valuing is achieved in time. That is why,
the creation and, then, the proper operation of national social archives of
qualitative data, insuring both the preservation and the management of all the
valuable data produced at a certain time, at the level of the autochthonous
scientific community is imperiously necessary. In this sense, it would probably
not be hazardous to conclude that sharing within the scientific community all
the valuable qualitative data, resulted from the researches in various branches
of the social sciences, could have an extremely beneficial result on the
development of the social life knowledge process, offering us a
multidisciplinary, panoramic and panhistorical perspective on the world we live
in.